1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to image segmentation, and more particularly to a system and method for a three-dimensional image segmentation using an active polyhedron.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Segmentation is a vital component of many clinical medical imaging applications, including anatomic analysis and modeling, morphological measurement, visualization, and surgical planning. Unfortunately, segmentation is often a challenging problem due to difficulties resulting from noise, limited contrast, and weak boundaries often observed in medical images. While manual segmentation can help address such issues, it requires tedious, labor-intensive work, particularly for three dimensional (3D) data. Consequently, there has been much recent interest in automated segmentation approaches, which can be grouped in to two major categories.
First, deformable surfaces that represent a surface explicitly have been used in numerous medical imaging problems, including the segmentation of anatomical structures. While it is possible to model topological changes using an explicit surface representation, an advantage of the second major category of segmentation approaches, those based on level set methods, is that they rely on an implicit surface representation that can automatically change topology when necessary.
Although the function that controls the speed of each vertex in either the explicit or implicit schemes may depend on a local, global, or region-based statistic or descriptor, the motion of each vertex is not coupled to its neighbor vertices or adjacent faces. As a result, such methods are prone to segmentation errors resulting from local variations in the statistic or descriptor, and can therefore produce erroneous segmentations. In particular, the surface may leak into nearby unrelated regions or break apart into multiple disconnected pieces, or have an irregular shape.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for robust 3D image segmentation.